Monthly Archives: March 2006

More RSS in Australia

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I have posted before regarding the uptake of RSS in Australia. Since that last post, there has not been much more adoption of the technology, news.com.au still doesn’t have it (not even AustralianIT). None of this particularly surprises me, usually we have terrible uptake on good for the consumer developments.

What did surprise me was to see the prominance of RSS feeds on AFL.com.au, there are 2, one for the main stories and another for the Footy Blog. Having seen it on the footy website, I looked on Baggy Green and low and behold I see the little orange icon. Needless to say, I have subscribed.

It’s hard to describe how happy I am that news of the real world will now be flowing through my NewsReader.

GMail’s Keyboard Shortcuts

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One of the basic tenents of a good user-interface is learnability or discoverabilty (I’m sure that’s a made-up word.) Everything should be laid out in an easy to learn way. The problem with the keyboard shortcuts in Gmail is exactly this. Every time I want to try and use the keyboard to do something, I have to go to Help and search for keyboard shortcuts. I realize that this will save me effort in the long run, but it’s not so good to help the novice user.

Blogging’s Brazil Nuts

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It has been said on many occasions that the blogosphere is an echo chamber. Whether it is or not, it generally brings good, new content to the eyes of many. This works because each person with a blog subscribes to a heap of blogs, and they point to interesting things they see. So, given a couple of iterations most people will have seen something pass through their aggregator.

This is very similar to the Brazil Nut theory where the smaller particles work their way under the bigger particles and push them to the top.

That’s all fairly obvious and elementary, until you add the meme-trackers to the frey. People start going to Memeorandum for their fix. This works by watching a certain group of bloggers and pointing to stories that start getting a little bit of traction. Problem is, that people like Robert Scoble who has been one of the best linkers start using the Meme tracker and stop reading the same content. In essence, he has only been linking to what has already worked it’s way to the top.

However if everyone who Memeorandum was watching, only watched Memeorandum, nothing new would ever be come to the top, unless of coursed it was produced by the memetracker’s list. In essence, this would be like having a jar of brazil nuts, with no peanuts to help bring the good stuff to the top.

So Scoble, thank you for trying to shake the jar and bringing the good nuts to the top again.

Menu-item Positioning

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It’s not something I have read alot about, but I’m sure somewhere there are best practices regarding where is best to place a menu item. It’s pretty clear to me, that moving a menu’s order should be avoided, however I have just noticed an instance where the menu should have been reordered.

In Firefox and IE the last option in the Tools menu is, Options (or Internet Options), however after installing Greasemonkey 4 new menu options appear at the bottom of my Firefox Tools menu. I would suggest that Options is one of the most frequently used items in that menu (and all of the menus) but it has now been relegated to a more difficult place to find.

I’m not sure this should be hard coded into the browser, but it certainly should be discussed in a “Firefox Interface Guidelines” document.

Nissan Exa for Sale

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I have a 1987 Nissan Exa with a CA18DET for sale in Toowoomba, Queensland. (Transportable to Brisbane) It does not have a road-worthy cert, nor is it registered.

It’s missing the front bar and has a dent in the front right guard. It has a Microtech MT-8, 14inch alloys and aftermarket muffler. If you are interested please send me an email.